Red Coat, Red Light

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It is legal to sell sex in France provided you have reached the age of consent and then consent. The French consider this an inherent human right. In theory, you might think that sex for sale should be impossible because it is illegal to advertise the product in any way. Proxénétisme, the sublimely weird word for procuring, is also forbidden, and passive solicitation is also défendu, this being defined as wearing provocative clothing in an area known to be frequented by prostitutes. The theory, of course, sits on the shelf with other theories, and the prostitutes of Paris are earning their daily baguette. I have often wondered how passive “passive solicitation” can be. A night walk gave me the answer, a little north and east of where Les Halles used to be. The sex trade used to center on la Rue St. Dénis, but has migrated north where there are some streets closed to cars. The evening was pleasant and very quiet, the street I was walking on was unremarkable, and the only activity I saw, maybe ten metres ahead of me, was four men approaching a woman in a bright red coat and stiletto heels standing under a light. I was close enough to hear voices, but could not make out what they were saying. Getting closer, I could see that the woman was looking exasperated or maybe just confused. Closer still, I could hear that she was mixing American English with less than school-girl French and making no headway with the men. They didn’t seem threatening, but they did not seem to be about to leave, either, and the woman was getting flustered. I said good evening to her in English, for once dropping the French accent I usually put on when talking with Americans, smiled broadly, and began to talk as if I knew her. The men looked sheepish—and Frenchmen actually excel in the hangdog—and walked off. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of what had happened, but I had a hunch. The woman was very glad I had arrived and began spouting everything at once. Her husband had gone into a sex shop, which she pointed at a few doors down the street, and she did not want to go in. She made a face. She was standing by the street light because it was dark and that made her a little nervous. So she wandered over and stood there while her husband was presumably finding a sexual T-shirt to bring home as a souvenir: given the way she was talking, I didn’t think he was going to pick out a sex toy, especially the jumbo ones I could see in the store’s window, but who knows? She finally got around to telling me she hadn’t understood a word the men had said. “They kept saying ‘peep, peep,’ something, something peep.’ I think it was a question. Do you know what that means?” Yes, I did and do—and wondered if I should tell her. Tailler une pipe and, less imaginatively, faire la pipe—literally to thread a pipe and to do the pipe—mean to give a blow-job. I began slowly, offering each phrase in French. Yes, she said, that sounds like it, I think. Then I gave the literal translation. Nothing crossed her face except puzzlement. This was getting so good that I was having trouble not laughing. So making myself seem as serious and sober as I possibly could, I gave the accurate idiomatic translation. I do not always shut my mouth after I have said a mouthful, so instead of pausing and realizing that she was squirmingly unhappy with what I had explained to her, I added, “You should be flattered. There were four of them. They must have thought you exceptional.” She shrieked—and on cue her husband came out of the sex shop with a bag in his hand. He looked at me and charged. I started laughing fit to burst, thinking if I am going to be beaten to death by an outraged husband because of one of the oldest tricks of French farce—le quiproquo or complete misunderstanding of the situation—it might as well happen in Paris on a street known for prostitution. The laughter stopped the man a metre or two shy of me. “What’s so funny?” I thought better of saying he was or his wife was or being shanghaied into a farce was and that all of them added up were hysterical. But he insisted on knowing what was going on and was very angry and very large. So I stayed with the facts, from top to bottom. He asked his wife what she had said to the four men when they asked her about “peep.” She said that she thought she remembered how to say “I don’t understand” in French and that’s what she had said. I asked to repeat what she had actually said. “Je ne sais pas,” she more or less pronounced. “Ah, I think I see the problem. You told them ‘I don’t know.’ You can understand their confusion.” Her confusion was obvious enough. She was horrified. “Damn,” her husband yelled, furious, “you just should have said go away. In English. They would have understood that,” and he threw his bag down on the street. “Look, it could have been worse. Nothing happened. No one was hurt. And really,” I told them both, “it could have been a lot worse. She could have been arrested for passive solicitation—that red coat just might qualify along with the red heels on a street like this—and you could have been arrested along with her for pimping.” “But I wasn’t even here,” and that tore it for…
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